After successfully staving them off for nearly a year, Nancy Pelosi finally succumbed to Democratic calls for impeachment.
“Sadly, but with confidence and humility, with allegiance to our founders, and our heart full of love for America, today I am asking our chairman to proceed with the articles of impeachment,” Pelosi said, straining not to smile. But most crucially, she said the lines that Democrats have been dumb not to plaster to their foreheads for the past three months.
“The facts are uncontested. The president abused his power for his own personal political benefit at the expense of our national security by withholding military aid.”
Democrats salivated in pursuit of an impeachable offense. Just moments after being totally exonerated of impeachable offenses in the Mueller report, President Trump laid the groundwork to do just what he’d been falsely accused of since 2017: to seek assistance from a foreign government to improve his odds in a presidential election.
The rest of the Democratic Party still doesn’t understand that they need to sell a single impeachable offense, the one highlighted by Pelosi. They may not even be able to sell the country on that, but they certainly cannot sell it on a smorgasbord of “Orange Man Bad!”
The charge against Trump — whatever you think of the evidence — is at least very simple. Using presidential power to induce a foreign government to embarrass or even investigate a domestic adversary is an abuse of power. We already know that’s what happened. Democrats need to prove this was Trump’s intention to make the case that it was an abuse of power, a clearly impeachable offense based in English common law, historical precedent, and the written intentions of our founders.
But despite an early uptick in public support, Democrats have completely lost the plot, rhetorically shifting from “quid pro quo” to the ridiculous “bribery.” While “quid pro quo” might technically be true, presidents initiate totally legitimate quid pro quos all the time, providing Trump the Mulvaney defense. While “extortion” may be true, it again obscures intention, which is the central question at hand. And while “bribery” sounds the most illegal, it implies to a general audience that the funds — which were authorized by Congress — should have remained withheld, but were paid out in exchange for something.
Democrats should have made a single question — “Did Trump abuse the powers of the presidency for his own personal gain?” — the sole tagline of their pursuit and spend every iota of public attention attempting to prove that the answer to that question is yes. Instead, the investigation has been riddled with the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez admitting that Democrats have been acting in bad faith and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who arguably already discredited himself, fulminating over process crimes instead of the only crime that people actually care about.
The legalese of extortion is complex for the average person, who is wisely far more preoccupied with work and family than Beltway shenanigans. Abuse of power is easy to understand. But Democrats decided to take too many turns and complicate their narrative. That the House Judiciary Committee spent its first day of its impeachment proceedings using three law professors to explain the case exemplifies how far astray they have gone.
